The funny thing about this post is that I decided I wanted to write it back in Sep­tem­ber; Which as you can tell, surely (you can’t be seri­ous), is NOT within any time range that you may call “instant”. Any­way I’d like to share with you a short dia­tribe about tech­nol­ogy and speed and what it means to design­ers today. Also, I used a $10 word: Instan­ti­ne­ity. Pretty cool huh?

Note: The time between orig­i­nal writ­ing and com­ple­tion of this post has been vast, my info might not be cor­rect but I encour­age great feed­back to cor­rect me!

Fast and Furious

Of course we all know about Moore’s Law and the fact that the pro­gres­sion of tech­nol­ogy will dou­ble every 2 years. Some­times it seems even faster. Mostly, our every­day life is based on the need. The need for speed. (Sorry for the corny 80’s movie ref­er­ence, but c’mon, you know Top Gun is awe­some). Peo­ple, us, every­one, want to get done what we have to get done fast and effi­ciently, in order to make more money and have more time in our day. We’ve gone from horse drawn car­riages at 5–10 MPH to super cars on super high­ways at 75mph(legally any­ways) and jet planes at 500mph. Brick ovens to Microwave Ovens. Long, mean­ing­ful courtships to quick­ies in the train sta­tion bath­room (OK maybe this last one is a lit­tle off topic.). The inter­net is no dif­fer­ent. In the past 15 years we’ve gone from dial­ing in to BBS boards on 14.4 baud modems to watch­ing the US Open, live on our com­put­ers on an ultra-fast Cable or fiber optic con­nec­tion, while we tweet about it and check our email on our phones. We’ve gone from hav­ing KILOBYTE con­nec­tions to GIGABYTE con­nec­tions. We’ve cre­ated social net­works that let us know what is going on in each oth­ers lives NOW, not when we hap­pen to call or write some­one and get a re-cap of their last few weeks of life. We want MORE in LESS. This isn’t always a bad thing, and we keep up with it well…and tech­nol­ogy is doing a great job of keep­ing up and keep­ing us happy (for a few min­utes any­way). Now we are mov­ing into a new realm. Instantineity.

No more wait­ing for searches, down­loads, or emails (which actu­ally have always been pretty instant)…but now com­pa­nies are play­ing with pre­dic­tions. Try­ing to get deliver us results before we type them. Social media even has a play in this, because all that we share and do on the inter­net now (if your per­mis­sions are set open of course) is cached and com­piled and affects what we are shown. This is what Google does, and now they claim to do it near instantly, with Google Instant. Awe­some. Or is it?

Arriv­ing before the horse

Google is a game changer. All the time in fact they are improv­ing projects and chang­ing the way we asso­ciate with the world and the inter­net. This one puts the ‘pre’ in ‘pre­ma­ture’. I’m not sure we are ready for it. A few years ago, we real­ized that peo­ple love search­ing for what they are look­ing for on search engines. It has become how most of us inter­act with the web. There is so much con­tent, why not use these tools to find what we need right? We mostly search instead of browse, which inci­den­tally is the way we used to find books in the library. This cre­ated a mar­ket niche we know as SEO. Search Engine Opti­miza­tion. We dis­cov­ered that we can take steps in our web devel­op­ment process to make a search for “Clydes­dale” show our page for “The Clydes­dale Pub” show before a page on horses. Pretty neat-o. Pretty effec­tive. And now, pretty use­less? The way I under­stand Google Instant and Google searches in gen­eral, is that every page has a page rank, based on the spidering(the ser­vice searches our whole site for most fre­quent tags, etc.) of the site and the commonality(how often a search results in a user click­ing on our link) of the site. Now how­ever, they are “pre­dict­ing” our searches as we type, deliv­er­ing results per let­ter in mil­lisec­onds. What we find with this is as you type, C-l-y-d-e…boom there’s our site, awe­some, but wait…s-d-a-l-e H-o-r-s-e-s. Our site is gone again…and because it’s NOT what the user wanted while they were typ­ing and pre­dict­ing, our site takes a HIT to it’s page rank. This hap­pens over and over and over again, and before you know it, when you search for “The Clydes­dale pub” there is a pos­si­bil­ity that you are no longer the top result. No bueno. Damn this instant $h*7 is gonna kill my sites influ­ence! That is of course unless we change our think­ing of SEO. It needs to evolve. No longer adding tags all over the place and key­words to attract atten­tion from the Google arach­nids. We need to ven­ture into the world of SMO in asso­ci­a­tion with good and seman­tic design prac­tices. Social Media Optimization.

SMO-ther it

So you have a Twit­ter and a Face­book fan page for your site. Great start. But how does this help? Well, I’ll tell you. Google does some­thing called Social Search. Every­thing you have online that is avail­able to the world (aka you don’t have your secu­rity boosted) is brought into your social cloud. So if my Face­book is attached to my Google pro­file (which it is) and I say on Face­book that I “like” Aus­tralian Cat­tle Dogs, and I run a search for “Dogs” on Google, guess what I’m more likely to get results of? That’s right, Echid­nas. Wait no, I mean Aus­tralian Cat­tle Dogs. I’ll also be more likely to get results about Whip­pets, because I have 3 friends on Face­book that own and “like” Whip­pets and that all gets added to my search cloud as well. ALSO, I live in Chan­tilly, VA…where a lot of peo­ple also own and “like”/search for “bea­gles” enough to affect my search, and THAT gets added to the mix too.  CRAZYGONUTS BIG BROTHER NATION. The good thing about this? More peo­ple are see­ing more results that they want and like quicker and faster than ever before. It works, go Google. The bad thing? A cer­tain per­cent­age of the time, this is going to fail MISERABLY. I can no longer search for “dogs” think­ing I can get eas­ier access to info on dogs that I’ve never heard of before. I now have to accept what Google thinks will serve me best. Do we want Google mak­ing up our minds for us? It can really go either way don’tcha think? This could be to the ben­e­fit of the masses, but at the same time, this could poten­tially cause for poor search results for those just want­ing to search the cloud for some­thing new. Also, Google’s algo­rithm puts spon­sored links towards the top of your search, so you are get­ting not only what Google thinks you should get, but also, what Eukanuba paid Google to tell you what you want for him. Le’ Sigh. Wait, I strayed from the point of this paragraph…ummm, to bet­ter serve your clients as a designer, def­i­nitely advise them into the Social Media realm of busi­ness mar­ket­ing. Every­one is doing it, no, seri­ously, EVERYONE (Yeah, that’s right, I just WB Masoned your ass).

The dam­age to design

I’m sure we under­stand how this effects our futures as design­ers. Clients will always want us to do bet­ter, faster, cheaper work. Yes, I’m say­ing is that Google is mak­ing life hard for us in the end. It’s a stretch to make that con­nec­tion I know, but I really wanted to tie in this graphic.

Graphic Print Avail­able by Colin Harman

We should have respect for our­selves and our work, and stick to our guns that make us, in fact, more desir­able. ‘I won’t rush it, I won’t give you a dis­count, I’ll do it the right way, in the right time, for the right price. Hav­ing this atti­tude shows that we are con­fi­dent in our abil­i­ties, and tell the client that they will be get­ting a good deal, and a great out­come, even tho they may end up pay­ing more than they thought, but now they’ll know what they are pay­ing for. YOU and Your awesomeness!

Clos­ing Remark

One of the ways to impress upon your clients the worth of your work, is to doc­u­ment your efforts well. A good designer sub­mits a well thought out, con­cise pro­posal and final­ized con­tent, well doc­u­mented, some­times even with charts and graphs! I’ll write on design doc­u­men­ta­tion soon! Thanks for stop­ping by, please leave feed­back or con­tinue the discussion!

Chris Trude

Chris is a twitter-head, blog­ger, and web/graphic designer by night, and an in-house graphic designer by day. Also hap­pens to be an avid prac­ti­tioner of awe­some­ness. Feel free to sub­scribe to my feed, or fol­low me on Twit­ter to keep in touch with my day to day.